"The thing I look back on now and consider an immense blessing in my life is that we had the Community Art Center — a place we could retreat to and be ourselves, ask questions, challenge perspectives, be intuitive, voice concerns, be innovative, translate what we were going through, what we were feeling, the turn of events happening in our lives into a productions for others to see."

- Paulina Mauras, Alumni

Founded in 1932, the Community Art Center is a neighborhood institution committed to our mission: to cultivate an engaged community of youth whose powerful artistic voices transform their lives, their neighborhoods, and their worlds. The Art Center has established an excellent track record of providing creative, challenging learning opportunities to youth. We do this in the context of a family-like environment with intensive social and emotional supports including academic help, mental health and transportation services and up to three full meals a day.

Our programs promote our organizational values: We believe in the power of young people, we believe in the power of artistic expression, we believe in taking care of ourselves and each other and we believe in creating positive change in our neighborhood and beyond. The Art Center achieves its mission through intensive, year-round activities for a core group of youth ages 5-19 and through youth-led community programming that engages local and national audiences in quality artistic experiences.